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 🚀 Welcome to SCALE’s Insight Round-Up!

Welcome to our round-up of insights from world-class investors such as Index Ventures, General Catalyst, Insight Partners, ICONIQ, and many more, all in one place.  

Starting now, we will alternate between weekly founder interviews and insight round ups!

In this edition we cover:

• 🤖 Everything in AI: the hot topic discussed at the VC dinner table

• 📈 Growth Strategies: uncovering the secret sauce behind growth

• 🏃 Operational Excellence: driving efficiency across an organisation

• 🐐 How can Vanta support your business??

The Three Fates of Work in the Age of AI

Key takeaways: How will AI impact our jobs? Index Ventures argues that these workers can be categorized into 3 distinct groups: (i) ‘Relieved’ workers: AI will enhance productivity by automating routine tasks and freeing them up for meaningful work e.g., lawyers, accountants, (ii) ‘Reinvented’ workers: AI will require them to reskill but there are clear opportunities for AI to generate value e.g., marketing,  journalism. (iii) ‘Replaced’ workers: AI will replace jobs where labour is a fungible and instrumental input e.g., retail, transportation. Index emphasises the importance of proactive policy measures to mitigate job displacement​ for reinvented and replaced workers.

👉️ Click here to read the full article: The Three Fates of Work

Vive la AI: Building France to be an AI Powerhouse

Key takeaways: France’s history and long-term commitment to AI has positioned it to remain a leader in the field. As the fund looks to continue investing in AI in the region, it outlines factors that set up France to become an AI superpower. This includes: (i) strong academic roots & top talent (e.g., over 500,000 relevant researchers in a thriving ecosystem), (ii) billions in private and public investment into the ecosystem (e.g., €1.2B from Amazon and €400Mn from Microsoft), (iii) a best-in-class ecosystem across the application and infrastructure layer. With this backdrop in place, Iconiq is bullish on the French AI ecosystem and investment landscape! 

👉️ Click here to read the full article: Vive la AI

SearchGPT: What It Means for SaaS Marketing

Key takeaways: Insight highlights that SearchGPT offers several advantages for marketers: (i) excels in contextual understanding, allowing it to provide more relevant responses, (ii) conversational queries make interactions more natural and intuitive, (iii) dynamically generated content can drastically improve marketing capabilities. However, as with all LLMs, gaps in technological capabilities makes human oversight crucial to ensure the effectiveness of the outputs.

👉️ Click here to read the full article: SearchGPT article

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📈 Growth Strategies 

How to Navigate M&A to Scale your SaaS Business

Key takeaways: Insight Partners identifies five common pitfalls that SaaS startups often encounter in M&A. (1)Buyer Persona: Misunderstanding the target audience leads to misaligned segments post M&A. (2) Product Roadmap and Backlog Management: Lack of clarity causes integration delays. (3) Sales Motion: Inconsistent sales approaches hinder revenue growth. (4) Enablement and Reinforcement: Inadequate training and reinforcement create operational inefficiencies. (5) Renewal Process: Neglecting customer renewal strategies impacts long-term success.

👉️ Click here to read the full article: Navigating M&A

Inside Shein: The Disruption and Opportunities Behind Real-time Retail

Key takeaways: NEA dives deep into how Shein has scaled into an Inditex sized beast whilst having 23 years less on the clock. They allude to Shein’s superior technology-enabled manufacturing capabilities, specifically (i) using many manufacturers to increase their SKU count (Shein adds 6,000 SKUs daily), (ii) test-and-reiterate model of quantity of SKUs using predictive AI technology. NEA notes there is a massive opportunity for this in other retailers, as being taken by Raspberry AI, Syrup, and Portless.

👉️ Click here to read the full article: Inside Shein

The Fastest Route to Success

Key takeaways: How do you take on (and beat) one of the Magnificent 7? Learn from MapBox, who provides a technological infrastructure that allows developers to build upon their mapping technology. Investors viewed the “mapping” market as an easy win for Google, and Mapbox struggled to raise any financing. Instead, they bootstrapped and used publicly available data, satellite imagery, and ML to build their maps, and chose to focus away from the consumer use-case and towards developing a flexible model for developers to build on. Their latest move:  autonomous driving technology.

👉️ Click here to read the full article: The Fastest Route to Success

🏃 Operational Excellence

CAC is the new CapEx, EBIT“CAC” should be the new EBITDA

Key takeaways: General Catalyst argues that using EBITDA as the north-star metric for later-stage technology companies leads to underinvesting in growth. The idea here is that late-stage (and most) technology companies tend to be “asset light” but “expenses heavy”, i.e. most elements of EBITDA (especially interest, taxes, D&A) don’t really apply to technology businesses. Therefore, it makes more sense to use EBITCAC as a metric that separates the operational side (margin on revenue, cost of operating, investing in new business lines) from the growth engine (CAC).

👉️ Click here to read the full article: CAC is the new CAPEX

Startups on the Brink: Why a Boom in Innovation is Around the Corner

Key takeaways: Will startups survive this economic downturn? While the current climate is difficult, it is marked by technological advancements and shifting market needs, making it ripe for a new wave of startups. This will be driven by: (i) Decades of accumulated wisdom on hiring & growth (e.g., statistics on target headcount growth for startups). (ii)Reduction in barriers to entry to build new tech enabling small teams to achieve outsized impact. This is something that has also been echoed by Fabrice LaCroix, CEO of Fibrecoat in our interview here. (iii) A global pool of diverse experts & mentors for founders to leverage 

👉️ Click here to read the full article: Startups on the Brink

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Plus, you can streamline security reviews by automating questionnaires and demonstrating your security posture with a customer-facing Trust Center, all powered by Vanta AI.

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Get $1,000 off Vanta